Google said it will be shuttering Picasa to shift its focus to the new Google Photos service launched less than a year ago.
"We believe we can create a much better experience by focusing on one service that provides more functionality and works across mobile and desktop, rather than divide our efforts across two different products," Google Photos chief Anil Sabharwal said in a blog post.
Pictures or videos in Picasa online albums will be automatically available in people's Google Photos accounts, according to Sabharwal.
Those wishing not to shift to the new service will still be able to view, download or delete photos in Picasa albums, but the software won't be updated and adding images won't be an option.
"One thing to make clear is that none of this is happening today - if you have a Picasa Web Album you can keep using it as normal. We'll start rolling out these changes on May 1, 2016," said Sabharwal.
Also, as of March 15, 2016, Google will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application. For those who have already downloaded this - or choose to do so before this date - it will continue to work as it does today, but the company will not be developing it further, and there will be no future updates.
"We apologize for any inconvenience this transition causes, but we want to assure you that we are doing this with the aim of providing the best photos experience possible," Sabharwal said.
(With inputs from AFP Relaxnews)
With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...